Developers Love Bacon - Conference

And that is exactly what it is. A friendly get together of people that like to code
and other things they are interested in.
All talks are limited to 30 min and come in a huge variety.
Thus the talks are more about general inspiration than about hard facts.

Due to the fact, that the conference runs two
tracks in parallel I could only attend about half of the talks.

My Highlights

Jason Scott,
was probably the most entertaining and passionate speaker at the conf.
What starts out a bit wired and arty progresses into a talk that conveys his passion
for saving the cultural data that is hosted and bound inside all the new shiny
online services (instagram for cats anyone?).
Specially in cases where all the data is about to permanently to disappear, with
30 days notice.

Everyone likes music. So does PJ Hagerty.
Given the right mix you can increase your concentration and get cleverer, at least for a couple of
minutes / hours.
Watch PJs talk for more information and a great presentation of what is possible
with music and how you can get new listening material that is both new and
interesting.

Seth Vargo has a condition. While his OCD can drive him crazy during a normal day
out and about, he found that it also comes in handy in his job as a Dev and also
makes him ridiculously efficient when it comes to shopping.
This talk gives a delightful view into a very orderly mind and makes a point
that you can live your life with OCD.

Adam Onishi talks about having Burnout.
I learned that it is not something that happens to you, but a tendency of overworking yourself,
which will happen again if you are not careful.
Apparently a strong intrinsic motivation, which lets you accomplish great things,
is also the reason why you overwork yourself.
A very personal talk.

At the bacon is somewhat famous for having at least one talk about booze :).
While you will not be able to take part in the wisky
tasting Billy Abbott still holes an interesting talk about the process of actually creating
the spirit. Did you know that it is basically distilled beer?

Being a bit overwhelmed with the sheer about of choice of beer in Londoner pubs,
Ben Fields sets out to apply Natural language processing (NLP) to tackle the problem.
Another highly informative and very entertaining talk.
Obviously one can not teach the math behind things like
Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)
in a 30 min. talk, but he manages to give the gist across and just show what is
possible with a bunch of text and an understanding of a domain.

Security is a tricky thing. Tim Perry reiterates some exemplary incidents of
different parts of the web stack in a funny well structured way.
He also reminds us that best practices are best practices for a reason and that
many of the incidents could have been avoided if people would run the test they have
and read their bug trackers.

Conclusion

I really liked the Bacon 2014 for its lineup of
interesting talk about all kind of things.
You will probably not experience an scientific talk about implementation details
or the latest distributed algorithm, but chances are you stumble across a talk
that sparks an interest in
Wisky,
Arduino programming
or even
Powerlifting.